


got static instead

by thisstableground



Series: less than ninety degrees [13]
Category: Do No Harm (TV), In the Heights - Miranda/Hudes
Genre: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Autism, Autistic Ruben, Autistic-ADHD Usnavi, But more specifically so here, I mean they both always are, Learning Disabilities, Light Angst, Multi, Neurodiversity, internalized ableism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-26
Updated: 2019-10-26
Packaged: 2021-01-04 00:24:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21188480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisstableground/pseuds/thisstableground
Summary: Maybe it's different if you're literally a supergenius like Ruben, but Usnavi's here about to cry over filling in a freakin' form and he doesn't think a label telling him why he finds it so damn hard is going to make him feel any better.





	got static instead

**Author's Note:**

> Content warning: as mentioned in the tags, there's a fair amount of internalized ableism to Usnavi's perspective on his own neurodiversity/learning difficulties. For a bit more context on why, go read [rise to me](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15192683/chapters/35235254).

Sometimes the letters come out backwards. Or they go in backwards, he’s never quite been sure, it’s pretty much always a 50-50 as to which way round the R is even supposed to go but it’s not like it _matters_, not the way that people matter or talking matters or living matters. It’s just lines on a page and Usnavi’s always lived out loud.

Except that sometimes, unavoidably, it does matter. Like when he’s got to fill out a billion and one forms just to put his store up for sale, like this wasn’t hard enough already.

He moves his fingers carefully to where he was always taught they were meant to go, a steady little set of points positioned around the pen, and he gets as far as “U-S-N-A-” then his hand cramps up and the pen wobbles and the “V” falls out of the little box its supposed to be sat in.  
  
“Goddammit,” he mutters, but it’s okay, he doesn’t mind too much, it’s just a little messy.

He grips the pen harder and ignores the cramp. It wouldn’t win any calligraphy prizes but there, in uneven black block capitals along the line at the top, USNAVI DE LA VEGA. So that’s the easy part.

It shouldn’t be difficult at all, is the thing. It’s a bunch of lines and boxes and he knows he knows the information. Like, come on, one of them is just asking for the address of the business, which he definitely damn well knows, but the sheet in front of him is all lines and boxes and he’s trying to concentrate on just one at a time while the rest of them keep creeping into his vision and all his trying-to-be-neat letters keep creeping out of where they’re supposed to go and in all the mess he can’t seem to get to the bit of his brain where he keeps the address of the business he has lived and worked at for twenty-five fucking years to actually write it down.

It’s _fine_. It’s okay. This happens with stuff like this, with things that scare him or stress him out. He had to figure out a bunch of it after his parents died, which was just a fucking trip because exactly what he needed then was to sit down with the only bit of the store he didn’t have the slightest clue how to run. Whenever he’d tried before his eyes and the paper wandered about so much that it just gave him a headache, and his mamá said _don’t look so sad, Usnavi, there’s plenty of time to learn._

There wasn’t time for them to teach him it, though. It’s not like he can’t read or write. It’s more like sometimes he forgets how to, or like he sometimes loses progress and turns back into how he did it when he was a kid for a while. He’s never got good handwriting but he can scribble notes to himself at a reasonable speed and he can read certain things fast even when there’s more words. He managed in school and he managed when his parents left him with this place and he’ll manage it now. But he hates how it always makes him feel like he's nine years old again.

If only Nina were in town, if only Camila were here. They're good at making these things make sense: Usnavi’s good at making coffee and making loud noises and making people smile, but he can only try his barely-even-mediocre best with this.

He’s got two copies of all the forms so he can make all the mistakes on one and copy the right stuff over on the second, but he’s struggling with the first attempt already. It’s not just the words are shifting but the sentences themselves are weird, phrased all ambiguous and Usnavi’s got a crazy-good vocabulary but he can never interpret this shit. It makes him nervous, because it's always for something _important_, and that makes even the bits that he’d be able to do no problem in any other context seem impossible.

_If you don’t know the answer to something, _he can hear Nina’s patient voice saying, then _sometimes it's easier skip it and then go back later, instead of getting worked up right at the start._ So he writes a careful wobbly question mark next to his address, trying not to feel like an idiot for it. It’s in his head, he just can’t make it come out right now.  
  
He puts a question mark and then another question mark and there’s strings of numbers half-filled out, semi-remembered details about taxes and building inspections and all of this information is sat in all the files and folders and forms piled on the table in front of him. He could just look it up. When he tries to tell himself to just open any one folder to get what he needs he can’t, there’s too many and he can’t decide which one to look at first so he doesn’t look at any at all. There’s so much of it and he doesn’t know where to start.

He’s still only on the first side of this three-page document. It’s almost entirely a bunch of increasingly agitated question marks. Might as well have not started at all - no, it’s okay, he’s _not_ gonna get upset. He can do this. Address.

When he goes back up to the top of the page to fill it in next to his name, he notices than in the capital N in USNAVI he’s put the slanting line the wrong way. He hasn't made that mistake in _years_, but there it is right now. Twenty-five years old and it’s still a coin toss about whether he can even write his own name properly.

“Goddammit,” he says again, and his voice cracks this time. He takes his hat off and throws it down, crosses his name out savagely, pressing so hard with the pen it leaves a mark in the cheap wood of the table underneath. There’s a horrible pressure behind his eyes and in his throat and he feels stupid, stupid, fucking _stupid. _“Fuck, shit, _goddammit_.”

The front door to his apartment bangs open then shut. Right. He invited Ruben over. Supposedly to do something fun, or preferably something _Fun_, but probably what’s going to happen now is Ruben’s going to sit at Usnavi’s kitchen table watching him cry all over paperwork, which even someone who parties so hard at the intersection of Nerdy and Kinky as Ruben does probably wouldn’t get off on. Maybe if Usnavi were crying over mathematical formulas or chemistry, but Usnavi mostly only needs math for the store and let’s not go bringing potentially hazardous substances into the sexual equation.

** _Pay attention_ ** _, Usnavi._

“Hey- oh, _Usnavi_, what’s wrong?” As soon as he sees Usnavi’s face, Ruben comes immediately to his side and tangles a concerned hand through his hair. “What happened?”  
  
“No pasa nada, it’s just all this stuff I gotta sort out for selling the store,” Usnavi explains, trying not to think too hard about Ruben with his PhD at twenty-two and Usnavi here getting teary over the basic alphabet. “I ain't no good at this shit. And there’s so _much_ of it.”  
  
He glares at the paper. Ruben sits next to him and slides it over so he can read it. “Ah, okay. Well, let’s break down the problem. Which bit are you having trouble with?”

“All of it,” Usnavi says, despairingly. “It’s just- the way it’s laid out, and the stupid way they word everything and all the boxes mess with my head and that messes with my writing and I forget all the shit I know because there’s too much noise, and it all gets mixed up and then it makes my hand hurt.”

“Usnavi,” says Ruben slowly, tracing the dipping uneven lines of his letters on the sheet in front of him with a fingertip, wearing that same expression that too many people have worn before, when they see something in him he's been trying to ignore since middle school. “I don’t know if…have you heard of a condition -“  


“_Yes_, Ruben,” he says, impatiently, because he knows what’s coming. He doesn’t want the gentle questions or the explanations or the analysis. “Yes, I’ve heard of all of them and thanks for the concern, but no, I don’t wanna sit here and have you pick out a label and tell me all about what it _means_ and that there are doctors out there that I can’t afford to see and all the scientific little whatevers that explain it because none of that is gonna help me fill out this one specific piece of shit simple piece of _paper_, which is really all I wanna do right now.”

“Okay,” says Ruben quietly, a flash of hurt quickly suppressed across his face, and Usnavi feels like there’s a black hole in his lungs. “Well, I can help with _that_ a lot more than the other stuff anyway, if you still want me to?”

“_Oh_. Oh my fuckin' God, I’m sorry,” Usnavi says, which isn’t good enough at all. His eyes are starting to burn so hard he can’t see through the blur. “I’m so sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to-_Jesus_, I’m not gonna yell at you then make you help me, I’m not - I _won’t_ do that to you, let’s just leave it, solo olvídalo and I’ll deal with it myself tomorrow-“

“Hey, come on,” says Ruben, because Usnavi’s got himself stuck in one of those endless sentences that he sometimes forgets to breathe through. “Relax. It’s fine. I get it, I promise you I _get_ it. And you’re not making me help you, I offered.”

Usnavi just shakes his head hard, not trusting himself to say anything.  


“You’re allowed to get upset,” Ruben says gently. “Vanessa’s allowed to grouch at things and I’m allowed to get bitter and you’re allowed to like, once in a blue freakin’ moon express a negative emotion without punching yourself in the face about it afterwards.”  
  
“Not at _you. _Not ever at you, Ruben, I don’t want to be like-“  
  
“Usnavi,” Ruben grabs his shoulders and rests their foreheads together, eyes big and open and honest right up close to him. “You’re _nothing_ like him. Not even a little bit. You have to trust me to decide my own limits, okay? And you can decide yours. If you don’t want me to help that’s fine, but I’m saying that I want to.”

“Okay,” says Usnavi in a small unsteady voice. “Okay. I’d like it if you helped. Gracias.”

Ruben kisses him hard on the mouth and then pulls his chair in a little closer. “Cool. Alright, so if it’s all a big mess then first we gotta break it down into smaller messes. Is this your practice one? Let’s go through the questions and see if we can rewrite them together. Then we can figure out where you keep all the information for it.”

That’s what they do: Ruben takes apart the questions word by word out loud with Usnavi til it makes sense, and in his tiny neat handwriting on a new sheet of paper writes them out clearly labelled, clearly spaced apart. He writes a list of what information Usnavi needs and where that can be found because it’s easier for Usnavi to remember it one question at a time instead of trying to fit the whole thing in his head at once.

He never once tries to take Usnavi’s pen and actually write the answers for him, or say _it’ll be quicker if I just do it for you_. He just decodes and explains. Usnavi slowly, carefully fills out the new form and the page stays mostly still and his eyes mostly don’t try and wander off to find something else to look at. His letters aren’t neat and never will be but at least they’re all the right way round this time.

Ruben is scribbling away beside him as he finishes- how does he make it so readable when he writes so fast? Usnavi watches him work.  
  
“Whatcha doin'?” he asks, curiously.  
  
“Oh. Uh, I noticed while we were going through that a lot of the phrases you had trouble with were things that come up a lot in similar paperwork? So I thought I’d write like, a glossary, sort of, so you’ve got something to refer to for if it starts to mix you up next time. I mean, it’s not guaranteed to mean the same thing, it’s probably not even that helpful, I just thought that -“  
  
“Ruben,” Usnavi says. “You’re something else, you know that? Your students must fuckin' love you.”  
  
Ruben tries to look modest but then he grins. “They do,” he confesses. “And there's at least two who definitely have a crush on me. Not that I’m into that dynamic, but it’s pretty flattering.”

“I’m still sorry I got mad at you,” Usnavi tells him.

“That barely even counts as getting mad. I didn’t know it was a sore point. I wasn't trying to pressure you, i just wanted to know you’d thought about it. Sometimes a label can help. But only for some people, so it’s okay if you don’t want that.”

Usnavi feels quiet, right down to his bones in a way he isn’t usually quiet, right down to his hands laying still on his lap. “Does it help for you?” he asks.

He doesn’t mean the PTSD. This, a thing Ruben only ever called by name one time, so Usnavi doesn’t know if he’s allowed to say it either. It’s not a secret in the way that Ian is a secret, painful and still filled with too much misdirected shame. It’s not a secret the way that all the things Ruben hates about himself are secrets, hidden like rocks at the bottom of a waterfall, jagged edges that they’re slowly eroding, because Ruben doesn’t seem to hate this. It’s just a thing that Ruben likes to hold quiet and careful for himself, with a strange tenderness like cupping a butterfly in your hands. It’s just that Ruben doesn’t have a lot of himself that life hasn’t forced him to display unwillingly, and this is something all for him. And a little to share with Usnavi and Vanessa, but only very privately.

“It doesn’t _change_ a lot of things,” Ruben says, “My brain still works the same no matter what you call it. But yeah, it really helps. I like things to make sense and I like to know the shape of things and it makes that easier.Which means I have more space to deal with all the other stuff too.”

“I’m happy it works for you,” Usnavi says. “But. I already tried that shit in school. It’s not gonna make a difference, and I can’t afford it anyway, and if I can’t do nothing about it then I don’t see the point of any of the other names for any of it. I’m just me.”

“That’s fine,” says Ruben. “For me it’s...these are different subcategories of Ruben. I like knowing what to call all of them, that’s my system, that works for me. But if you think it won’t work for you then you can be just Usnavi, and we’ll figure the rest of it out ourselves.”

“Okay,” he says, relieved. “That’s good. I mean, bein' Usnavi is about the only thing I’m good at, I kinda want to stick with it.”

“You’re the bestat being Usnavi,” says Ruben. “It’s the only thing I ever want you to be.”

**Author's Note:**

> Comments make me extremely happy and encourage me to write more!  
Come say hi to me on [tumblr](https://thisstableground.tumblr.com/)!


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